Simon de Vegt

01 About

I'm a software architect based in Eindhoven, at the heart of the Brainport high-tech region. Over the past decade I've moved across the entire stack — literally: from designing optical communication protocols and FPGA verification environments, through custom compiler backends, up to distributed enterprise systems and AI integration.

What ties it all together is a love for challenging projects: problems where correctness matters, downtime is expensive, and "it mostly works" isn't good enough. I'm consistently rated among the top performers wherever I work, and I'm happiest when a project forces me to learn a new domain from first principles.

Beyond architecture and code I enjoy coaching engineers, having guided a team of around twenty colleagues through their professional development for several years.

03 Selected Work

A few highlights from roughly a decade of building software at a vertically integrated high-tech company in the Eindhoven region.

1. Now

   Software Domain Architect — AI

   Responsible for integrating in-house developed AI capabilities into existing software products, while keeping production-critical systems running and evolving.

2. 2024 – 2026

   Distributed Product Lifecycle Management

   Led the migration of 300,000+ unique products to a new distributed PLM platform — without interrupting production systems backing roughly half a billion euros in annual revenue. Designed international synchronisation of business data across services.

3. 2022 – 2024

   Logistic Automation

   Modelled warehouse behaviour as formally equivalent functional models and worked side-by-side with process engineers to tune job-scheduling algorithms to real business constraints.

4. 2021 – 2022

   Embedded Interconnect Architecture

   Designed in-band, sub-nanosecond time synchronisation for an existing communication protocol, and demonstrated hard real-time communication with a round-trip time under 2 µs on a pre-release bare-metal x86 platform. Built the FPGA validation and verification setups to match.

5. 2020 – 2021

   Custom LLVM Compiler Backend

   Improved a floating-point-only instruction set for motion control and built the complete LLVM backend targeting it, plus a simulator for quantitative analysis of generated code.

6. 2019 – 2020

   Server Production Test Architecture

   Created a reusable automated production test for next-generation high-end server hardware — surfacing and resolving design flaws before they reached customers — and modernised the department's workflow from SVN to Git with CI and automated deployment.

7. Earlier

   Manufacturing & Mobile

   Built live PCB component tracking for manufacturing, maintained the mobile iOS ecosystem for years, and coordinated maintenance across all in-house software with a team of ±20 engineers.

05 Beyond Work

I build things off the clock too: a museum navigation app for blind visitors, a 10×10×10 RGB LED cube from bare hardware up, and an ever-growing home automation setup. I've volunteered on construction projects building and renovating housing in Hungary, Romania and Guatemala. When I'm not building, you'll find me snowboarding, swimming or in the gym.